Surprising how in 2021 we’ve learned that the deal between media companies and authors is absolutely not beneficial to the latter: Sovereign Writers and Substack by Ben Thompson.
For a long time it was obvious that paying same salaries or base the payments on volume (often calculated by number of produced characters) is not an effective way to pay for writing.
Companies began to experiment paying based on performance. Usually measuring page views and how many people have read through the whole article.
There are a lot of problems with such schemes. For example they often push to produce clickbait or sensational content that could easily generate clicks. I am not sure if a lot of companies do that now. I guess not.
But turns out that the best authors bring much more value to the publications than any bonus they could get after such performance review.
And thanks to Substack the proof now is visible and apparent to everyone. We now know how much money the audience is ready to pay for author’s work. Several times more than they could get in any publication!
So as soon as the world became ready (payment processing on the web, subscriptions) a business model emerged that showed the real value of high quality journalism.
It’s now apparent how much money publications are making from their best authors. And how inefficient the media business model (i am talking about ads of course) is to take advantage of that value.
Sure, maybe people are not ready now to pay for all types of journalism. And you must have a starter audience to begin earning something from writing. But it is now obvious how much money in the author -> media -> reader relationship the middleman is getting.